Last week, an entrepreneur and writer named Marco Arment trashed us in a blog post, which was then picked up and forwarded around the Twitter-sphere.

Marco accused us of lots of horrible things, including "scraping" his content without permission and making it look like he wrote for us. He also complained that we didn't send enough visitors to his web site.

Well, when we read Marco's post, we were initially confused, because we actually don't do what he said we did, at least not deliberately.

So we launched an investigation of sorts. And, eventually, we finally figured out what happened.

We thought that, by now, Marco's frustration was last week's news, so we weren't going to take your time explaining what happened. But then Felix Salmon of Reuters said he wanted to write about it and asked us a bunch of intelligent questions. So we figured we might as well go ahead and explain.

Before we begin, though, we should say that one reason we didn't explain is that it will take a lot of time to do so (thus the several-thousand words below).

In case you're stretched for time, therefore, here's the bottom line:

We don't "scrape" content, at least not in the way Marco thinks we do (For an automated feature of the site called "The Tape," we publish headlines from RSS feeds that are directly linked to the publishers' sites. We don't include any publisher or writer in The Tape who doesn't want to be there.)

We don't intentionally "make it look like" writers like Marco write for us

We don't create pages with short snippets of content from third-party sites to "game Google." Right now, we DO create such pages, because our publishing system needs to create a page to direct-link a headline to the story on the writer's site, but these pages include links to the original source and therefore don't help us with SEO).

We publish stories from hundreds of outside contributors, with permission and links back, and we make it clear that these stories are written by outside contributors

We help our contributors reach a much larger and different audience than they would by just publishing on their own sites, thus increasing the impact and influence of what they write (and giving our readers more awesome stuff to read)

We link directly to stories on tens of thousands of sites, including, in the past, Marco's

In aggregate, we send LOTS of readers to these sites—nearly 1 million in August.

We often test different page layouts, features, and services—which we then modify, adopt, or kill. (Marco encountered one of these last week and assumed, logically, that it was permanent).

Our contributors and direct-links to third-party sites are only part of what we do: We now have an editorial staff of more than 30 full-time folks who follow news from hundreds of thousands of sources and create original stories and features based on it.

We allow anyone, including our competitors, to publish up to one of our original stories per day (in full), as long as the story is properly attributed and includes links back to our site and other headlines. This is what we do with contributors' content, so we think it's only fair that we allow our contributors to do the same thing with our content.

We encourage anyone, including our competitors, to "over-aggregate" any story we write, as long as our work is properly attributed. Over the past month, a new perceived sin has emerged in online journalism, one that Marco actually didn't complain about: "Over-aggregation." I'll follow-up with some separate thoughts on this. For now, let me say that our attribution policy internally is to "credit and attribute others the way you want to be credited and attributed yourself," which usually means naming the writer and publication and including links back to the original story. As long as we are credited in this way, we actually not really concerned whether all the readers on the other site click through to the original story. We hope some do, of course, but we're mostly honored and grateful to the writer for highlighting our story and us, and we're happy to help the writer's publication get some additional readers as a thank-you. (In the old days, traditional publications used to hire PR firms to get other publications to write about their stories. We're thankful that the world has progressed and publications like ours no longer need to do that).

We will never link to anyone who doesn't want us to link to them. (We don't know of any of these folks, but if they're out there, and tell us not to link to them, we won't).

We have not yet figured out the perfect way to seamlessly combine external linking, syndicated content, and proprietary content in a way that is always a win-win for everyone involved—but we're getting much closer to doing so. One thing we are sure of is that, in a world with a million sources of information and awesome content creators only a link away, it would be senseless to create a "walled garden" in which the only content we bring to our readers' attention is content our employees have created. Our goal is to get closer to this "win-win for everyone—readers, contributors, and external sources" every day.

And with that "pre-amble" out of the way, here are the details on Marco's complaints. (Grab a cup of coffee—it's going to take a while).